And now the old man was speaking. “Visitors!” he said, holding out his hand. “My own people! I never thought I’d lay eyes on such again.”
The sound of that voice swept all my doubts away. Here was no illusion, no apparition, no magic. Here was a man, a human, the voice deep and somber, filled with human gladness at the sight of fellowmen.
Sara held out her hands and the old man grasped them and the two of them stood there, looking into one another’s eyes.
“It’s been long,” the old man said. “Too long. The trail is far, the way is hard and no one knew. You-how did you know?”
“Sir,” said Sara, still gasping from her climb, “you are- you must be Lawrence Arlen Knight.”
“Why, yes,” he said, “of course I am. Who did you expect?”
“Expect?” said Sara. “You, of course. But we could only hope.”
“And these good people with you?”
“Captain Michael Ross,” said Sara, “and Hoot, a good friend met along the way.”
Knight bowed to Hoot. “You servant, sir,” he said. Then he reached out a hand to me, grasping my hand in a warm, hard grip. In that moment, when there were other more important things to note, I could only see that his hand, despite the firmness of the grip, was an old and wrinkled hand, blotched with liver spots.
“Captain Ross,” he said, “you are welcome. There are places here for you, for all of you. And this young lady-I do not have your name.”
“Sara Foster,” Sara said.
“To think,” he said, “that no longer need I be alone. Wonderful as it all has been, I have missed the sound of human voices and the sight of human faces. There are many others here, creatures of great character and fine sensitivity, but one never quite outgrows the need of his own species.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, trying to figure in my mind how far back the legend of this man might run.
“When a man lives each day to the full,” he told me, “and with the close of one day looks forward to the next, there is no counting of one’s times each day, each minute becomes a part of all eternity. I have thought about it and I am not sure there is such a thing as time. It is an abstract concept, a crude measuring device, a perspective structure built up by certain intelligences, and by no means all of them, because they feel a need to place themselves into what they call a spacetime framework. Time as such is lost in foreverness and there is no need to search for beginning or for end because they never did exist and under a situation such as here exists the meticulous measuring of ridiculously small slices of eternity becomes a task that has no meaning in it. Not, I must make haste to say, that one can slice eternity. . .”
He went on and on and I wondered, looking off across the valley from where I stood on the marble-columned porch, if he were unbalanced by his loneliness, or he might know some part of what he said. For this place, this valley that sprang out of nowhere, did have a look of eternity about it. Although as I thought this, I wondered how any man might know how eternity would look-but be that as it may, there was a feel of the unchanging in this place of bright white sunlight.
“But I ramble on,” the old man was saying. “The trouble is I have too much to say, too much stored up to say. Although there is no reason why I should try to say it all at once. I apologize for keeping you out here, standing. Won’t you please come in.”
We stepped through the open doorway into quiet and classic elegance. There were no windows, but from somewhere in the roof the sunlight came slanting in, to highlight with a classic brilliance the chairs and sofa, the writing desk with a small wooden chest and scattered sheets of paper on its top, the polished tea service on the smaller table in one corner.
“Please,” he said, “have chairs. I hope that you can spend some time with me.” (And there, I thought, he talked of time when he had said there might be no such thing as time.) “And that is foolish of me, of course, for you have the time. You hold in the hollow of your hand all the time there is. Having gotten here, there is no place else to go, no place else that you would care to go. Once one gets here, he never wants to leave, never needs to leave.”
It was all too sleek and smooth, too much like a play, well-written, and yet there was nothing wrong with it- just an old and lonely man with the gates of suppressed talk unlatched by the unexpected appearance of people of his race. Yet, underneath it all, underneath my own acceptance of this place and of this man (for here were both of them), I felt a prickling uneasiness.
“There are places here for you, of course,” he said. “There are always places waiting. Very few even win their way here and there is always room. In another day or two I’ll take you around and we’ll call upon the others. Very formal calls, for we are formal here. But the thing about it, the best thing, is that once protocol has been observed, you need not call again, although you may find some of them you’ll want to visit now and then. Here dwells a select company called from all the stars and some may be amusing and others you will find instructive and there will be much that they do, I must warn you, you will not understand. And some of it you may find disturbing and disgusting. Which need not perturb you in the slightest, for each one keeps his counsel and his place and. . .”
“What is this place?” asked Sara. “How did you hear of it? How did you. . .”
“What is this place?” he asked, with a muffled gasp.
“Yes, what is this place? What do you call it?”
“Why,” he said, “I’ve never even wondered. I’ve never thought of it. I have never asked.”
“You mean,” I said, “that you have been here all this time and you’ve never wondered where you were?”
He looked at me aghast, as if I had committed some unwitting heresy.
“What would be the need to ask?” he said. “What the need to wonder? Would it make any difference if it had a name or did not have a name?”
“We are sorry,” Sara said. “We are new here. We did not mean to upset you.”
And that was all right for her to say, but I had meant to upset him and in the process perhaps jar some sense
